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The Sweet and Sour Flavor of Mistakes
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Even the best cooks make mistakes.
“I’m afraid of making mistakes.”
I hear that more than anything else from people who tell me they’d like to learn to cook but are afraid to. It’s not the weird chemical reactions, or the complexity of the recipes. It’s not even a fear of the myriad of physical dangers awaiting one in the kitchen – it’s the terror of making a mistake and having to face other people afterward.
Accidents, of course, happen. I’ve had them: spanakopita so salty it was inedible, vinegary gazpacho, burned rice. As I’m only 42, and assuming I live the full-life span of the typical North American male, I expect I’ll make thousands more mistakes in the kitchen before I hang it up and call it a life. They’re frustrating, but they’re important, too. Learning to cook isn’t learning to whip up Food Network-meals and entertaining friends, it’s making mistakes. More important, it’s learning from those mistakes.
“Never apologize for anything that happens in the kitchen,” said Julia Child famously. I derive a lot of my fearlessness in the kitchen from that saying, although I’m still given to apologizing profusely for the errors I make. I’m wimpy that way. But cooking is an ongoing learning process. A good cook never stops learning and, by extension, will continue to make mistakes.
There is a way to mitigate those screw-ups though, and it's very simple: taste as you cook. Taste everything. Adjust what needs to be adjusted and then taste it again. My biggest mistakes have been from not following that basic rule.
A good cook can draw on a highly-informed vocabulary of tastes. Knowing the flavors of as many foods and ingredients as possible feeds your imagination and gives you the information you need to experiment and explore.
Do you want to learn to cook? Then begin tasting. And make those mistakes.
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